UCL Cancer Institute

Name: Christopher Bell

Position: Research Associate

Email: christopher.bell@ucl.ac.uk

Tel: +44-20-76790963

Further Details:  I gained my undergraduate degree in Medicine from Otago University in New Zealand, and after attaining full registration worked in the N.H.S. for several years. An initial foray into research at Bart's Genome Centre led to the offer to work towards a Ph.D. in human complex trait genetics, with Philippe Froguel, Professor of Genomic Medicine at the Hammersmith Hospital, Imperial College. This involved genomewide linkage, and physiological & positional candidate gene association studies, in Type II Diabetes and Obesity. Subsequently I took up one of then only two medical trainee positions in Genetics for the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia, involving rotations through prenatal & cancer laboratories, reporting, as well as designing and validating new tests. My research interest is focused widely on Common Disease Genomics, with specific interest in susceptibilities that have arisen through human evolutionary mechanisms. I am excited to join Prof. Stephan Beck & his team to investigate the Epigenomics of Common Disease.

Name: Lee Butcher

Position: Research Associate

Email: l.butcher@ucl.ac.uk

Tel: +44-20-76796004

Further Details:  I graduated from Sussex University in 2001 with a BSc in Experimental Psychology and an appetite for the genetic basis of psychological traits. In 2006 I completed my PhD under the supervision of Professor Robert Plomin at the Institute of Psychiatry (Kingís College London) where I co-developed a high-throughput, genome-wide allelotyping method. Toward the end of my time at the IoP, a spate of high-powered genome-wide association studies (GWAS) appeared that indicated that single SNP effects in common complex disease were small but ubiquitous. This led me into ëepigeneticsí, which ñ I feel ñ may contribute more profoundly to human health and disease than solely sequence-based approaches. In early 2008 I joined Professor Beckís lab to establish a high-throughput DNA methylation pipeline."

Name: Helena Caren

Position: Research Associate

Email: h.caren@ucl.ac.uk

Tel: +44-20-76790963

Further Details:  I obtained an Msc in Molecular Biology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden in 2002. After working at a Clinical Genetics laboratory developing a new method for analysis of amniotic fluids, I started my PhD in the cancer genetics field. During my PhD I worked with the paediatric tumour neuroblastoma for which we identified genomic and epigenomic alterations associated with patient outcome. In 2009, I gained my PhD in Clinical Genetics at the University of Gothenburg and in 2010 I was happy to join Professor Beck¥s group to gain more experience in epigenetic analysis by profiling the epigenetic alterations that occur during the differentiation of cancer stem cells."

Name: Pawan Dhami

Position: Research Associate

Email: pawan.dhami@ucl.ac.uk

Tel: +44-20-76790997

Further Details:  After completing my post graduation studies in India in the field of Human Genetics, I moved to the UK to pursue a career in research. Subsequently, I completed my PhD in 2006 under the supervision of Dr. Dave Vetrie based at the Sanger Institute, Cambridge. My PhD thesis involved elucidation of DNA-protein interactions using ChIP-chip to study the transcriptional regulation of SCL gene during haematopoietic development. I also used ChIP-chip assay to build maps of DNA-protein interactions at a genome-wide scale in the human and mouse genomes to identify and elucidate various classes of cis-regulatory functional elements, e.g. promoters, enhancers, insulators etc. and link these functional elements to biological processes. To continue and broaden my research in the epigenetics field, I have recently joined Prof. Stephan Beck's lab to understand how DNA methylation plays a role in vertebrate development.

Name: Harpreet Dibra

Position: Research Associate

Email: h.dibra@cancer.ucl.ac.uk

Tel: +44-20-76790997

Name: Andrew Feber

Position: Research Associate

Email: a.feber@ucl.ac.uk

Tel: +44-20-76790963

Further Details:  I completed my BSc (Hons) degree at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne. In 2001 I joined the Institute of Cancer Research, where under the supervision of Prof. Colin Cooper I carried out my PhD, investigating the genomic alterations associated with the development and progression of urological cancers. In September 2005 I joined the laboratory of Dr. Tony Godfrey at Mount Sinai Medical School, New York, to start my postdoctoral training. During my time in New York I worked on the integration of high resolution genomic copy number, gene expression and miRNA expression data to define molecular signatures associated with esophageal cancer patient survival and to identify novel therapeutic targets. In March 2008, I returned to the UK to join the laboratory of Prof. Stephan Beck, at the UCL Cancer Institute, London, to investigate the role of methylation in the development and progression of cancer.

Name: Paul Guilhamon

Position: PhD student

Email: paul.guilhamon.10@ucl.ac.uk

Tel: +44-20-76796004

Name: Marina Kouyialis

Position: PhD student

Email: marina.kouyialis.09@ucl.ac.uk

Name: Matthias Lechner

Position: PhD student

Email: m.lechner@ucl.ac.uk

Tel: +44-20-76796004

Name: Tiffany Morris

Position: Research Associate

Email: t.morris@cancer.ucl.ac.uk

Tel: +44-20-76790999

Further Details:  I obtained my BSc from the University of Arizona in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Computer Science in 2002. I worked for two years at Columbia Universityís Biosphere 2 Centre, then went on to obtain an MSc in Computational Biosciences from Arizona State University. In 2005, I moved to the UK and worked in the Department of Pathology at the University of Cambridge where I completed my PhD in Molecular Genetics in collaboration with the Liggins Institute in Auckland, New Zealand. My PhD research involved investigating the molecular mechanisms involved in developmental plasticity, specifically the effects of under-nutrition during pregnancy on the development of the metabolic syndrome. Following this, I spent a year as a post-doctoral Bioinformatician at Barts and The London School of Medicineís Institute of Cancer designing a pipeline for the MetaAnalysis of cancer datasets from gene expression and DNA copy number experiments. In January 2011, I joined the Medical Genomics group at the UCL Cancer Institute to combine my experiences by analysing MeDIP-seq data to identify regulatory and epigenetic set-points that are altered by environmental changes during development and affect the regulation of the immune system, aging and longevity. This includes contributions to the development of novel analysis pipelines, databases and interfaces to support the groupís research.

Name: Dirk Paul

Position: Research Associate

Email: d.paul@ucl.ac.uk

Tel: +44-20-76796004

Further Details:  I graduated with a BSc and MSc in Life Science from the University of Konstanz, Germany. During my studies at university, I participated in the National University of Singapore Exchange Programme. I worked on complex diseases, such as cirrhosis at the Biopolis in Singapore, and asthma at Boehringer Ingelheim. For my Master's thesis, I worked on the development of a novel approach to targeted high-throughput DNA sequencing at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford. Until October 2012, I was on a Marie Curie PhD fellowship at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge, where I focused on the functional follow-up of genome-wide association study signals. I applied experimental and computational approaches to aid the identification of functional variants underlying association signals for haematological traits and coronary artery disease. In November 2012, I joined Stephan Beck’s group to investigate the role of epigenetic variation in the aetiology of type 1 diabetes in collaboration with the BLUEPRINT consortium.

Name: Benjamin Powell

Position: PhD student

Email: benjamin.powell.09@ucl.ac.uk

Name: Sabrina Stewart

Position: PhD student

Email: sabrina.stewart.10@ucl.ac.uk

Tel: +44-20-76790999

Name: Tosin Taiwo

Position: PhD student

Email: t.taiwo@ucl.ac.uk

Tel: +44-20-76790997

Name: Christina Thirlwell

Position: Research Associate

Email: christina.thirlwell@ucl.ac.uk

Tel: +44-20-76790997

Name: Gareth Wilson

Position: Research Associate

Email: gareth.wilson@ucl.ac.uk

Tel: +44-20-76790999

Further Details:  I obtained my undergraduate degree in Genetics from Cardiff University. Following this, I decided to take the leap into the world of Bioinformatics. I completed an MSc in Bioinformatics at the University of Manchester, before completing a PhD at CEH Oxford and Bath University under the supervision of Dr Dawn Field and Dr Ed Feil. My research revolved around the analysis of taxonomically-restricted genes in bacterial genomes. I am now very happy to be a member of the Medical Genomics group in the UCL Cancer Institute where I am responsible for the design and implementation of the computational tools needed to support the group. This includes the analysis of MeDIP experiments using the Batman (Bayesian Tool for Methylation Analysis) software and the development of databases and interfaces to enable storage and visualisation of our large epigenetic datasets.

Stephan Beck, PhD FMedSci
Prof of Medical Genomics
UCL Cancer Institute
University College London
Paul OíGorman Building
72 Huntley Street
London WC1E 6BT, UK
Tel: +44-20-7679-0964
s.beck@ucl.ac.uk